Warning: Bottom Trollers Read at Your Own Risk

This one is for all the idiots who think they can get the world’s best copywriter at a pay scale that would embarrass the night shift assistant manager at McDonald’s.

Check out this screen shot:

Some guy in Chicago wants a copywriter who will breathe some sales life into his dead art glass website and he wants to pay between 10 and 15 bucks an hour. Essentially, he thinks he can get an acne-faced teenaged burger flipper to sell objets d’art to the one percenters of the world.

The stupid scale doesn’t go high enough for this moron.

The job posting received several bids from “writers” in the Philippines and India and one US-based freelancer who had zero jobs to her credit. One person who bid had the audacity to bid $16 an hour! There’s someone who knows his or her value…not!

I fully understand that new freelancers need to discount their rate to jump start building their client base. But as I said at the top, I’m writing this for the idiots looking for slave labor, not desperate freelancers. There are some rules of economics, the labor market and communications that can’t be fooled, and you shouldn’t need a college degree to know and understand them:

You get what you pay for. If you want results, you have to spend money. The next time my car breaks down, I could push it up to the nearest homeless guy and ask him to fix it in exchange for taking him down to the nearest Quickie Mart and buying him a six pack of Colt 45s. But I would have no right to expect that my car would ever get fixed.

Most people can write, far fewer can write. It takes talent, training and experience—or at least two out of those three attributes—to write effectively. Anyone can put words down on paper and unfortunately many Americans couldn’t tell you whether or not they were spelled properly or grammatically correct. However, that doesn’t mean you should settle for bad language. If you do, we grammar Nazis will shame you on every social media account we have, and that’s saying nothing of the folks who will just laugh at your site and blithely click on. By the way, those are many the “bounces” you see on your analytic reports.

Sales writing—copywriting—is a specialized skill. Composing 23 run-on sentences to explain how you spent your summer vacation is one thing; crafting a headline and 27 words to engage your visitors and sell your product is something completely different. Madison Avenue copywriters get major six-figure salaries for this skill.

You must write for your audience. The market for this guy’s art glass is upscale and very well educated. Whoever writes this copy needs to understand the way those people think. Someone dwelling in the 10-dollar-an-hour world of black velvet Elvis paintings will not be able to effectively communicate with the nouveau riche browsing for sleek glass swan sculptures to display in their atria.

Have I made myself clear?